Week 5| Choosing Kindness

Attention Kindness Challenge participants!

If you haven’t signed up for the challenge yet and would like details about the challenge, click here.

Don’t forget to bookmark this post so you can link your reflection post here once you write it at the end of the week.

Week 5 Theme | Choosing Kindness

This week, we are going to focus on choosing to be kind, not that you aren’t already! Whether choosing to be kind in small ways that you might already do like smiling at strangers or doing random acts of kindness like leaving positive notes on a mirror in a public restroom. At the end of the day, you never know how something so small might impact someone. Not only will focus on being kind, the challenge is to do sowhen it’s especially hard. It might be by being polite to someone who is rude to us, it might be by going out of our way for someone who we feel doesn’t “deserve” it, it might be by practicing patience. Each day, we find ourselves in situations that kindness can be extended. I’d like for us to identify the times we might let our humanity get the best of us and choose to react instead of respond. Let us try to respond to every opportunity with kindness.

It’s not our job to play judge and jury, to determine who is worthy of our kindness and who is not. We just need to be kind, unconditionally and without ulterior motive, even – or rather, especially – when we’d prefer not to be.

-Josh Radnor

I wanted to share this video with you guys. I think it does a great job of showing how the ripple effect of kindness. Not only does it benefit the person receiving it, but the person who gives it, as well as all of those who witness it! You never know who you’ll inspire with your kindness no matter how small it seems.

Choosing Kindness Exercise-

Think of times you find it difficult to automatically respond with kindness. Is it at home? Is it at work? When you’re stressed? In certain situations? Pick one area you especially find yourself struggling to respond with kindness and work on being more kind in that particular instance this week. Note how you do each day.

If you prefer, take note of people in your life you find it difficult to extend kindness to. Find ways that you can be spontaneously kind to them in addition to how you can respond in kindness. If it’s not someone you’ll see this week, can you write them a letter, send them a thoughtful surprise, or just call to check on them?

As for being kind when it’s not hard, you can sign up over at Kindness Ninja to receive 100 ideas of random acts of kindness. This is a great way to incorporate kindness into your life on a regular basis. I personally enjoy doing this list with my kids.

If you can think of a different exercise to incorporate, feel free to do so. ❤

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Don’t forget to reblog or share this post using #revofkindness so we can get as many people to participate as possible!

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Reflection Prompt | You pick the day to post!

At the end of this week, post your reflection. How was your experience? What did you struggle with? What surprised you? What did you learn about yourself? Which exercise did you do? Did you find it difficult to do at the beginning of the week? Did it get easier as the week went on? How did people respond? How did it feel to focus on extending kindness when it was difficult for you? Feel free to share as much as you’re comfortable with. You’d be surprised by how many of your readers will be able to relate to how you feel and who you might encourage.

Use the #revofkindness tag on social media and Rev of Kindness tag on WordPress to help spread the word about this challenge.

Be sure to comment with the link to your reflection post once you publish it or link back so your post will appear in the comments.

Please visit at least two other participants’ reflection posts and leave a comment. I’m sure they’ll appreciate you taking the time to stop by and connect with them.

22 Replies to “Week 5| Choosing Kindness”

And here we go!
The fifth week prompt and all the information about the Kindness Challenge is in this post. You can join in at any time and post on any day of the week. I'll be posting on my usual day ~ Friday.

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